How long does an animated video take? The timeline, stage by stage

A short animated film takes between ten working days and eight weeks. That range is too wide to plan from, so here is the useful version: the stages in order, what each costs in days, which of them run at the same time, and the two that decide whether your date survives.

None of this is a study. It is arithmetic plus the pattern that shows up in project after project. Where a number is an estimate rather than a count, we say so.

What the clock is actually measuring

A ninety second film is ninety seconds long. So why does it take weeks?

Because the calendar is not mostly making. The hands-on work on a made-to-order film is roughly thirty to forty hours, spread across a schedule that also holds waiting: for a decision, for a signature, for feedback from the one person who was away. Four hours of work per working day across three weeks reaches that total. The film is not slow. The deciding around it is.

So plan three weeks from the day the brief is signed, not from the day you first send an email. Two of those weeks are craft, and the rest is review, which is the part you control.

There is a faster lane, and it is worth knowing what it is not. Nine's free page reads your website and plays Nine's own films in your colours, with no account and no card. It makes no film of your own, but it answers "does this look like us?" faster than any meeting, and that question is often what was blocking the brief. On a plan, Nine then makes a short film of your own in a few minutes. The stages below are what a made-to-order film goes through when a studio makes it by hand.

Stage one: the brief, where the weeks are lost

Typical range: two to five working days. It can also take three weeks, and when it does, your deadline is gone before anything has been drawn.

A brief is finished when it answers four questions. Who watches this, and what should they do afterwards? What is the one thing they must remember if they forget everything else? How long is the film, and where does it play? And who, by name, is allowed to say yes?

The last question is the expensive one. A brief agreed by the marketing lead but not yet seen by the managing director is not a brief. It is a draft, and the whole schedule is standing on it.

Compress it like this: give one person the authority to approve, set the date for that approval before work starts, and write the brief in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. If your organisation cannot agree on the message, animation will not settle it, and discovering that in week two costs a fortnight. The value of a written brief is that the film can then be judged against it, note by note.

Stage two: script, and the arithmetic that keeps it honest

Typical range: two to four working days from the brief, often overlapping the last day of briefing.

Script length is arithmetic. A comfortable spoken pace is about 140 words a minute, and for a calm film we plan at 130 so there is room to breathe. A 60 second film therefore holds roughly 130 words, which is about one paragraph. A 90 second film holds roughly 195 words, which is the length most explainers actually need. A three minute film holds roughly 390, and at that length you should ask whether it is two films instead.

The common problem is not quality. It is a script twice as long as the slot, which nobody notices until the storyboard is drawn.

Compress it like this: write to the word count, not to the page, and read it aloud with a stopwatch. That read-through takes four minutes and saves a week. If you have two audiences, two short films are usually faster than one long one that twice as many people have to approve.

Stage three: storyboard, the last cheap moment

Typical range: three to five working days. It is the first stage where you can see the film, and the last stage where changing your mind is cheap.

A storyboard is a sequence of rough frames with the script line under each one, and its only job is to prove the film works before anything is animated. Read it as a viewer: cover the script and see whether the frames alone tell the story. If they do not, the film will not either.

Compress it like this: review the board in one sitting with everyone who will review the film, and record that session. The notes from one hour are worth more than three days of email, and when time is short a good board can carry the whole approval on its own.

Stage four: style frames, where taste becomes a schedule risk

Typical range: two to four working days for three or four still frames, usually overlapping the end of storyboarding.

Style frames fix the look: colour, typeface, how a chart is drawn. They are cheap compared with animation and decisive for it, and they are also where projects quietly grow a week. Three stakeholders, three opinions about blue, round four of a still image. The work did not take longer. The deciding did.

Compress it like this: build the look from material you already own. Your website has already declared a palette and a typeface, which is the idea behind making the film from your own brand, and there is far less to argue about when there is less to invent. Decide the aspect ratios in the same conversation. A film planned wide, tall and square from the same material costs nothing extra to plan now. Adding 9:16 to a finished 16:9 film is not a crop, it is a recomposition, and that is new work.

Stage five: animation, long but rarely the delay

Typical range: five to ten working days, scaling close to linearly with length. A ninety second film sits at the low end. Past three minutes, this stage alone reaches three weeks.

Animation is the longest stage and, once it starts, the least changeable. It is also where clients expect to find the delay. In our experience it slips least, because by then the decisions are made. Animation is a train on a track you laid in the storyboard.

You cannot make animation faster by asking for it faster. You can only make it shorter by cutting duration, which is why the word count matters. Cutting thirty seconds in the script saves days. Cutting thirty seconds after the animation has started saves nothing and discards what was already built.

Compress it like this: leave this stage alone and buy your time earlier. If you must shorten, cut a whole sequence before the board is signed rather than shaving every scene during the build.

Stage six: sound, formats and delivery

Typical range: one to two working days for voice, music and mix, running alongside the last days of animation rather than after them. Delivery itself is a day or less.

Sound is where a film stops looking like a slideshow, and it has two hard dependencies: the voice session needs a locked script, and the mix needs a locked picture. Delivery is short but not instant, because the film ships in four shapes, each rendered and checked from the same material.

Compress it like this: book the voice session the day the script is signed, and choose the ratios when you choose the look. If the launch needs four formats, say so in the brief. The cheapest day in the whole schedule is the day you decide them.

The critical path, and where projects actually die

Only some stages add to the calendar. The chain that does is the critical path, and it runs brief, script, storyboard, style frames, animation, delivery. Sound runs alongside the end of animation, and animation revision rounds loop back into whichever stage they touch.

So the honest formula is this. Minimum turnaround is around ten working days, and it needs a signed brief on day one, a one page script, a fast board approval and no new ideas afterwards. Three weeks is comfortable. Five to six weeks is comfortable with two full revision rounds and a stakeholder group that has to be persuaded. Eight weeks is what happens when the brief was never really agreed.

Working backwards from your date beats working forwards from today. Put delivery on the calendar, count back a day for formats, a day for the mix, five to ten for animation, and you will see the date your brief must be signed. Deadlines that fail were usually impossible on the day the project started, and nobody did that subtraction.

What the schedule costs depends on who makes the film. Nine's prices are on the pricing page: a monthly plan, and a film of your own made in a few minutes rather than weeks, because the brief is your website, your script or your idea.

Almost none of the dying happens in animation, which is the steadiest stage in the schedule because by then the arguing is over. Projects die in the brief, when the message was never decided and the film is expected to decide it. They die in the review, when notes arrive from five directions over a week and describe a feeling rather than a change. Either stage can quietly consume more calendar time than the entire build.

Animation revision rounds are where that becomes visible, and they are the line item most schedules forget. One round is a day or two. Three rounds is a week, and if the third exists because the second did not do what the first meant, the week bought you nothing. The fix is not fewer opinions. It is one round of notes, in one document, from one person allowed to give them, which is the method in how to give notes on a film. In Nine, a film Nine writes is judged before you see it against a bar of nine out of ten; under nine it goes back once, and if it still falls short you see its score with it rather than a quiet "done".

So the answer is not a number of weeks. It is a number of decisions. Ten working days is real if you can make them in order and on time, and eight weeks is equally real if you cannot. The difference is not the animation.